Visual Voicemail lets you see important messages at a glance

Visual Voicemail allows you to sort through phone messages quickly and easily

May 21, 2009 One of the more tedious jobs at the end of a working day is listening to all the voicemails that have piled up while you’ve been busy in meetings. If wouldn’t be so bad if callers left a brief message, but listening to messages that aren't urgent drone on for minutes can be a little frustrating. Help may be at hand. As the name suggests, Visual Voicemail allows you to see all your voicemail messages at a glance.

Rather than call in for messages, you simply scroll through the voicemail inbox on your phone, prioritize the messages and respond to the most urgent, which not only saves you time but may even have you home in time for dinner.

Voicemail messages appear in an inbox with an email-like interface. This allows you to see the caller's details, the date and time of the call, the phone number and the length of the message. With one click, you can listen to new or previous messages. If you want to return or forward a phone call you simply click on the message.

The ability to sort in any order means that messages can be prioritized, responded to, saved or deleted quickly and easily. This way you can listen to work calls first – say if there's an urgent message from the boss – and personal calls later, regardless of the order messages are left.

Comverse, which is selling the visual voicemail service, recently announced that 3 Hong Kong, the mobile arm of Hutchison Telecommunications, would be the first operator in Hong Kong to offer the service and the first to offer a "click-and-listen" messages inbox on the iPhone 3G.

Urban Gillstrom, group president of global sales at Comverse says: “Fast becoming the next-generation voicemail standard around the world, visual voicemail has huge mass-market potential.”